Bastille Day is celebrated on July 14, commemorating the storming of the Bastille in 1789. The day symbolizes the rise of modern France. In Enlightenment, Revolution, Napoleon, Prof. Ravel covers the unique French experience starting with the reign of the Sun King through the rule of Napoléon Bonaparte: Absolutism, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Empire.

NextLab is a hands-on year-long design course in which students research, develop and deploy mobile technologies for the next billion mobile users in developing countries. This course features over 100 videos documenting the development of seven team-based projects, along with most class lectures and student-led discussions of assigned class readings.

MIT Mathematics Professor Arthur Mattuck wrote this guide to recitation teaching at MIT. During a typical recitation section, a teaching assistant meets with a small group of students to review the most recent lecture, expand on the concepts, work through practice problems, and conduct a discussion with the students. The title comes from the notion that getting an education at MIT is like trying to drink from a fire hose.

What do we know about the formation of planets? This course looks at the compositional and physical processes of planet formation based on observations from our own solar system and those we've glimpsed beyond the reaches of our Sun.

The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab's goal is to reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is based on scientific evidence. OCW has just published a five-day executive training program on evaluating social programs. While the course focuses on randomized evaluations, many of the topics, such as measuring outcomes and dealing with threats to the validity of an evaluation, are relevant for other methodologies.

MIT Professor Krzysztof Wodiczko opened a solo video installation last week inside the Polish pavilion at the Venice exhibition about the plight of immigrants in Europe. Wodiczko is using high-definition, large-scale images to give a voice to immigrants from Chechnya, Ukraine, Libya, Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Morocco who seek work in Europe.

Wodiczko's Interrogative Design Workshop asks important questions about frank and open speaking, and how artists and designers can best partake of the practice.

Generous donations by the MIT Class of 2009 and Martin Tang, SM '72 have made possible the production of new video lectures for 5.111 Principles of Chemical Science Fall 2008. These videos will be available on OCW later this summer.

The 50th anniversary of the smoot is being honored with a new plaque on the Harvard/MIT Bridge in Cambridge. Named for Oliver Smoot '62, a smoot is a unit of length equal to approximately 66 and 11/16 inches. Using Smoot as a measure, the Lambda Chi Alpha Fraternity marked the entire length of the bridge in 1958. The bridge is 364.4 smoots, plus or minus one ear.

Of course, smoots can measure many things. In session 21 of The Art and Approximation of Science and Engineering, one learns how to find the length of the radius of a hydrogen atom. How many smoots is a hydrogen atom? The radius is 0.5 angstroms (0.5 e-10 m). A smoot is 1.6939 m. Thus, the radius of a hydrogen atom is about 0.3 e-10 smoots.

A compilation of pioneering digital computing research conducted at MIT in the 1940s and 1950s has been transferred back to the Institute from MITRE Corporation. Project Whirlwind was a precursor to modern-day computers, first tackling parallel digit processing, random-access and magnetic core memory.

Take a look back at the early years of computing in The History of Computing, which covers the early use of computers as scientific instruments.

MIT engineers have built a new tissue scaffold that can stimulate bone and cartilage growth when transplanted into the knees and other joints. The scaffold could offer a potential new treatment for sports injuries and other cartilage damage, such as arthritis, says Lorna Gibson, MIT professor and co-leader of the research team.

MIT researchers are finding many uses for graphene, a form of carbon first identified as a theoretical possibility as early as 1947. Institute Professor Mildred Dresselhaus and others first worked with multiple layers of graphene in the 1960s when many scientists were saying that such an ultra-thin sheet of matter could never be found or even made.

Jeffrey Hoffman is a former space shuttle astronaut and professor of practice in MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. In "3 Questions," Hoffman talks about what the repair crew can expect during the fifth and final Hubble servicing mission on May 11.

More than 150 robots, in a wide variety of sizes, shapes and capabilities, will battle it out on May 6 and 7 to see which can collect the most soda cans and simulated bales of trash and return then to a recycling facility all in under a minute. The matchups are the culmination of 2.007, a required class for sophomores in mechanical engineering, and it's an MIT tradition that goes back more than two decades.

MIT chemists have synthesized a compound that could open the door to new drug treatments for cancer. Mohammad Movassaghi, associate professor of chemistry, said his team was drawn to the compound not just for its anti-cancer potential but also for its fascinating chemical structure. Learn more about Advanced Organic Chemistry from Prof. Movassaghi in 5.43 Advanced Organic Chemistry.

In this video from Boston.com, MIT sophomore Keone Hon tackles some mathematical questions about the Boston Marathon. "A Fermi equation," Hon says, "is a kind of street-fighting mathematics technique." For more on the art of guessing results and solving problems, check out Street Fighting Mathematics.

Laszlo Tisza, physics professor emeritus and an expert in quantum mechanics and thermodynamics, died on Wednesday, April 15. He was 101. Earlier this year, OCW published materials from his 1976 course Applied Geometric Algebra after Samuel Gasster '77 rediscovered his notes from the course. Professor Tisza will be greatly missed by MIT and the physics community.

Associate Professor Patrick Doyle is among 180 artists, scientists and scholars awarded fellowships by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The foundation selects fellows on the basis of "stellar achievement and exceptional promise for continued accomplishment." Doyle reports he will use his fellowship to develop soft functional microparticles. You can learn about scaling laws and the methods of continuum mechanics from Dr. Doyle in Molecular, Cellular and Tissue Biomechanics.

The Beeline Festival starts this weekend. Hosted at the Broad Institute, the Festival gathers an exciting variety of musicians from across the country (and sweetens the deal with ice cream, wine and local honey).

The festival includes a performance by Ensemble Robot and will feature pieces by Paul Lansky. Lansky's "Mild und Leise" is sampled in Radiohead's "Idioteque" on the album Kid A. Both tracks, notes on the use of the sample and an incredible variety of other resources such as these are available in the Listening section of Composing with Computers I.